In 1863, with the Civil War dragging on interminably, Lincoln imposed a draft. It wasn't popular. People were sick of going off to war and getting blown to pieces; they were disgusted because rich people could pay $300 - a year's wages for a poor man - to buy a substitute to take their place; and they were angered by the conundrum that they were going off to fight to liberate black slaves in the South, but the blacks in the Northern weren't enlisting to fight. That blacks weren't allowed to enlist wasn't relevant. Hate doesn't need logic, just excuse. The people of New York were pissed off, and did exactly what people have always done when pissed off by the high and mighty - they set out to set the town on fire. Scorcese used the Draft Riots as the backdrop for his film Gangs of New York, but opted to skip around the racism at the core of the riots.
In Paradise Alley, Kevin Baker confronts it head on. The book is rife with the casual racism that must have imbrued society 150 years ago. Baker also does not flinch from littering his pages with words like 'nigger', which may cause some well meaning editor a headache in years to come, if the recent travails of huckleberry Finn are anything to go by; and he describes the lynchings and brutality of the riots, which Scorcese seemed to have overlooked, somehow.
The story describes the lives of a handful of characters during the riots. The main focus of the narrative is three women - Ruth, Deirdre and Maddy. Their menfolk also feature, alongside a swirling cast of characters. Of particular interest are Ruth's husband, Billy, and her psychotic ex, Johnny. The former is missing, and as a black man in the middle of a race riot, that's not a good thing. The latter has just arrived bac in town, thirsting for revenge against Ruth, Billy, his sister Deirdre and her man, Tom.
So there you have the plot, in a nutshell, and the problem; which is that Kane chooses to frame his narrative as a series of intersecting personal stories, which necessarily regulates the riots to the background. The book isn't quite about the riots and it isn't quite about the crisis in the domestic arrangements of Ruth; and even though it is over 600 pages long, it doesn't seem big enough to accomodate both.
This problem is accentuated by Baker's use of multiple narrators. This seems spurious, as the book is narrated, on the whole, in the third person (one narrator is allowed the luxury of first person point of view - he's a writer, yah know, one of the annoying wink-winks in the story). Three of the characters - Ruth, Deirdre and Maddy - spend a lot of time together and witness a lot of the same things, and Baker thinks he is obliged to cover the same ground repeatedly, even when the new point of view adds nothing new, or the event described is trivial. Do we need to know how Maddy falls asleep with her head in Deirdrie's lap, first from Deirdre's point of view, and then from Maddie's? Do we need to be told at all?
This tendency towards redundancy is apparent in the final fate of the berserk Johnny Dolan. It's cleverly foreshadowed, but the realisation is fluffed. The reader can see what is happening, long before the befuddled Dolan; Baker continues to describe what happens anyway. There are also pointless flashbacks to Ireland during the potato famine. These are supposed to describe the experiences of Ruth and how she met the hateful Dolan, but they are drawn out at such length the suspicion is that Baker simply wanted to write about them. Some of it is shocking; some of it is amusing; none of it is really necessary to the actual story.
This is compounded by some clumsy plotting. Early on in the narrative, Maddy shows her lover the network of tunnels that lie under the rancid streets of New York; the reader realises (the creak of the plot is a give away) This Will be Important Later. And it is. Of greater concern is the dubious MacGuffin at the heart of the storyline focused on Ruth and Dolan - a 'Box of Wonders' (a sort of 19th century iPad). This just seems silly and this reader became tired of it very quickly.
I was also worried by the voices of the characters. Most of them are flat and the characters have the smell of cnentral casting about them. They sound exactly the same, and none of them sound like what I think a semi-literate 19th century American should sound like. Most of them sound suspiciously like well educated 20th century Americans, in fact, using all manner of fancy words and idioms. This is a difficult balancing act to get right, but I think Baker fails to achieve it. None of his characters seem to speak for themselves, have distinctive thought patterns, or exist for themselves.
There are some good things about the book. First of all, it's unflinching focus on the racism and violence that characterised (characterises?) American society. Second - and this may contradict what I said before - there is some intriuging secondary detail, particularly the competing firefighting crews. Some characters seem work better than others - Deirdre's husband Tom, for example, bitterly reflecting on just how he came to volunteer to fight in the war. Baker - Like Tom - seems to be more comfotable in the company of men and describing masculine pursuits like fire-fighting, rioting and shooting each other. Those sections of the book are far more interesting and gripping than the sections - interminable sections - where the focus is on Ruth, Deirdrie and Maddy.
But overall, it's a poor effort. Too often, I found myself wanting to button hole Baker and demmand, "If you cared enough to write 650 pages, why were you content to make such a botch of it?" because it should have been a great book. Instead, it's merely an almost-okay page turner.
